OK, so I finaly upgraded my computer into the mild 21st century, and to my disapointment, I cannot seem to run anything as smoothly as I had thought.

These are the specs for my computer...

ASUS m5a99x EVO motherboard

8 gigs ddr3 1600 ram

NVIDIA 9800gt 1 gig ddr3 gpu

AMD Phenom II x4 B50 Processor at 3.2ghz (IE its an AMD athlon II 450 X3 3.2ghz with its fourth core unlocked (of which i have had no problems with thus far, as it seems to be very stable)

150 gig 7200 sata 2 harddrive (OLD)

200 gig 5400 sata 2 hard drive (OLD AS SH*T)

300ghz portable usb2 hd (7200) (2 years old)

Basicly, I cant seem to run even basic text in after effects faster than 19 FPS.

I've tried to change the resolution to half, and even a fourth, and that didnt work at all, infact it made it run about 1 frame worse.

I tried changing the Open gl texture memory, raising and lowering, but to no avail, Ive changed the ram usage in after effects to use 2 gigs per core, then one gig, then turned off multiframe rendering alltogether, and nothing.

I feel like ive tried everything in my power.

Now the Imacs at my school, they run the program smooth as hell... and they arent that much better, spec wise than my computer.

Even my friends Imac can run it smooth, and he only has an I5 cpu at 2.4ghz, which is fine and my understanding of cpus is that those are better proccessors, but its not that much better, and even still, why would that be neccesary just to run text scrolling accross the screen?

Even more so, why would changing the resolution not have any effect?

What exactly do I need to run after effects smoothly for a basic text scroll at say, 720P?

I need to know what to upgrade, soon I plan to get cs6 and I would like to have a computer that can edit basic HD properly.

What I realy dont get is that I know people with laptops that are running AE smoothly and these are much worse than the specs on my machine, some even with only 4 gigs of ram...

Is there something wrong, do I have some sort of frame limiter thats capping at 19 fps? is there some sort of memory leak?

Any help would be much apreciated.

Now the only thing I can think of thats holding me back is the crappy hard drives, every thing else seems like it should at least run text on after effects at 30 fps.

What is your screen setup? Most of these problems relate to sync issues in unusual screen configurations and the graphics card not being able to handel it. Likewise, this could be an audio driver issue (ebven if no audio is used, this matters).

When you say you're getting 19fps, during what process? Running a RAM preview? Or just previewing with the space bar? A common mistake is the expectation that AE just plays previews in real time when you hit the space bar - it doesn't.

When you refer to "basic text", are you referring to an actual text layer, or the obsolete plugin called Basic text? Don't use the plugin unless absolutely necessary. If you're using a text layer, make sure it's not too oversized. Text layers are rasterised on every frame, so if they are scaled very large, or moved very close to a 3D camera etc, they can require large amounts of memory to be rendered.

Do you have a video preview output activated in Preferences? This can sometimes bog down preview speeds.

Try temporarily removing the Open GL plugin from the AE Plugins folder, restart AE and see if that helps.

Given your 8GB of RAM, turn off multiprocessing until you sort out this issue.

Your drives are quite small and, by your own admission, old. 720p video work takes lots of fast hard drive capacity. Buy a bigger hard drive as soon as you can afford it, preferably a 7200RPM drive.

thanks, that at least is enough to get me started, lol I have a deadline tomorrow and have been burning a lot of time on just trying to get this to run smooth.

BTW, I am running the project off of the portable, I switched from the old, but faster harddrive that was sata2 to the portable given I thought that might increase the speed, which it didnt.

what I might do is crack the case and just plug it straight into the computer, though I am hesitant to do so as if I were going to do that, I might as well just purchase a usb 3.0 one and do that so i can get sata 3 out of it, since those cases dont exactly just snap back together.

When I say basic text, I mean layered text, just word after word in order. I honestly dont have any plugins that I know of, (if I had the money for them I would have spent it on a better computer probably) so what I have is what came with the master collection.

And when I say 19 FPS I mean spacebar...

NOW I KNOW, that Im not garunteed 30 fps when running the preview, but when I use the mac, it previews fine... and i just looked up my CPU in comparison to the I5 in the IMAC that I was refering to, and mine is actualy faster according to some benchmarks, granted its not faster than the vast majority of I5s and I7s, but the particular ones in the computers I was refering to, mine is actualy faster over all, so I figure its not a CPU thing (unless its a -our software only works right on INTEL- thing).

Now as far as the 3d camera, yes I am using it, but even when I run the text without a camera function (ie the thing that you have in your comp) or any sort of 3d layering it runs just as slow.

The Audio might be a problem, I used to have a soundcard, but that died about a year ago so I have been using onboard sound (realtek HD something) which truly sucks in comparison to a proper sound card, but I cant imagine the IMACs have anything better, I mean the sound from the Imac kinda sucks alltogether, dosent even have any sort of virtual surround... But a driver issue it could be, realtek is kind of ghetto in that regard.

I will try some of the tips above (the open gl and the preview output and such), and thank you very much.

*EDIT*

OK, so with the preview output, I have computer monitor only? is that what you ment?

*EDIT*

OK, so I did the OpenGL thing, removed it, and for a brief few secconds, it started to run at a mix of 25 to 30 fps, then, when I went to play it again, it was back at 19.

HEY, so hopefully I dont jynx it, but I went to the preview button under the window, and turned OpenGL to allways on, which for the moment, seems to have worked.... go figure, anyhow, hopefully it stays that way.

Real quick question, and totaly the wrong thread I assume, but is there a way to move a camera around, not the view, but the placment, with the keyboard? like say no-clip/fly mode in a video game? I know how to look around, (just hit c, click and move the mouse) but I was woundering if I could MOVE around?

There are multiple camera tools to reposition the camera. If you can only look around, rather than move around, then you aren't using the right tools. You can also scrub the XYZ position values of the camera ( and it's POI, if enabled) from the timeline column. You can push the camera position (when selected) with the arrow keys, or Shift-arrow keys for larger movements.

Pressing the spacebar will almost never generate realtime playback of unrendered content. RAM Preview is the appropriate tool to do that.

No offense intended, but you seem to be trying to run before you can walk. You're struggling with terminology and tools that are essential to properly use After Effects. I strongly recommend you start with the basics - you'll save a lot of time in the long run.